HungryC

Looks very similar. I can't recall if the recipe I use has egg in the dough, but the filling is practically the same thing. I've had Lasoyne's meat pies; I make my filling a little spicier than their pies.

The best recipe for Natchitoches Meat Pies is in Cane River Cuisine, the community cookbook from Natchitoches. I don't have it in front of me right now, but it is very basic & delicious. You brown equal parts ground pork & beef, seasoned with a good bit of garlic & red pepper flakes. Once the meats are cooked, you add a bunch of chopped green onions (white & green parts), salt, and a couple T flour to thicken the mixture (cook for a little while after adding flour). Allow the filling to cool, then make your pastry & fill. The pastry recipe is a simple one, sort of like a stiffer biscuit dough, made with self-rising flour, shortening, and a little milk. (pie crust pastry is too delicate & the resulting pies fall apart, especially if you deep fry) I usually bake them, brushing the crusts with melted butter for a little color. I've tried variations on the filling, and the simple one is always everyone's favorite. I also make the crust into tiny open tartlets by pressing it VERY thinly into mini-muffin tins and filling with a teaspoon of meat mixture. Bake until browned for a nice hors d'ouevre,

This can't possibly be true...I watch local television, live in South Louisiana, and I haven't seen the clip or heard about it from ANYone here. Cute story, but seems like yet another urban legend born from Katrina, kinda like the sharks swimming on Canal St.

I think that the pupusas at Pupuseria La Macarena are better, but I haven't been all the way down Williams toward the lake since the storm. Guess I'll have to call & check to see if they're still open.

Streetcars on Canal only run from the river to the old Krauss building, not all the way through now-ruined mid-city. But at least it's a start. Streetcars uptown won't be running for quite some time; the aerial wire system was shredded, esp. on the far uptown end of the route. And yes, there are still large swaths of certain neighborhoods where it appears that little/nothing happened. Bavila: Audubon Park is as glossy as ever; most of the tree debris is gone & I see lots of kids at the playground on the St. Charles/Exposition Blvd site. And the zoo is open, albeit just on weekends. But you still can't have a burger at Camellia Grill; though you can get a slice at Nino's or a beer & pizza at Phillip's.

Diversified is Al Copeland's seasoning company. I think the bulk of their sales is to the Popeyes' chain--he no longer owns the chain, but still provides all/most of the seasonings used in their products.

Yellow Bowl's in Jeanerette. --And I think that jambalaya is one of the few foods that holds up well on a steam table. --I finally remembered where I'd seen a reference to red rice. I found it in a cookbook from the Carolinas.

That's a great-looking jambalaya....what kind of rice did you use? Personally, I go for a drier, fluffier texture. To each his own...but don't bring those tomatoes to my house. I'm really replying about the dried shrimp part of the discussion. I beg to differ with Mayhaw's assertion that they're only a beer snack. In the bayous of Lafourche & Terrebonne Parishes, dried shrimp are used in a variety of dishes: shrimp & potato stew, smothered mirliton & shrimp, in gumbo, with okra, etc. All of these dishes are hard-core home cooking, so unless you've got a cajun grandma or grandpa in the kitchen, you probably won't encounter them. Of course, they're a throwback to pre-refrigeration times, when shrimp were consumed fresh or dried--the only two options. I think that dried shrimp have survived as an ingredient in this pocket of acadiana for a reason mentioned in a previous post: until the mid-20th century, southern Lafourche & Jefferson parishes were home to several Filipino fishing communities where shrimp drying was the main activity. Manila Village in Barataria Bay survived the longest--it was a community of raised houses on the water surrounding a large wooden platform where the shrimp were spread out to sun-dry. The villagers removed the shrimp shells by walking over the finished product, a process known as "dancing the shrimp". Modern processors use forced, heated air in a clothes-dryer like tumbler to dry & remove shells. A few Filipino-americans raised in Manila village still reside in NOLA (or at least, they did before Katrina). Rouse's Supermarkets (southern LA chain based in Houma) sells dried shrimp in bulk containers, not just the little snack packages. They're not cheap, but a little goes a long way. The last batch I purchased were dried/packaged in Grand Coteau (north of Lafayette)--Pappy's Gold or something like that. Compared to the imported dried shrimp in asian markets, LA dried shrimp are chewier (as opposed to hard or crumbly), meatier, and completely shelled. I find the asian imports too fermented to eat out of hand, but I freely cook with & snack on the local ones (the cat loves 'em too).

You need to talk to the Entringers of McKenzie's (are there any of them left?) You've named the current big three of mailed/mass marketed king cakes, but don't overlook the effects of chain groceries as well. Schwegmann's did a bang-up king cake business, and Winn-Dixie, SavaCenter, etc. hawk tons of them today. The old "Mr. Wedding Cake" bakery on Elysian Fields was a pretty good king cake place, too (it ain't dere no more). Have you looked at the crazy chocolate/coconut "zulu" king cake? Yet another permutation that ended up in litigation--the Zulu carnival krewe sued whichever bakery was selling them for image/trademark infringement. I'm not that old (early 30s), and I can remember a time before fillings. As best as I can recall, fillings began to emerge in the mid-80s. Praline-pecan emerged shortly after cream cheese, but all of the other freaky flavors followed soon after. I think of this as the snow-ball-ization or daiquiri-ization of the king cake. It's part of a modern american trend...rather than a single, tasty, traditional item, a zillion different flavors are seen as an improvement...the same fate befell coffee beans and martinis! Another resource to investigate: Mam Papaul's foods, a prepared foods company located in St. Charles Parish, sells a boxed king cake mix. You might also want to check with them regarding king cake.

The city is definitely issuing mobile food licenses--I ate BBQ from a mobile vendor with a valid board of health certification prominently displayed. Papa Joe's, under the Miss River bridge approaches at St. Charles.

Oh, we had (still have) the relish tray, too (in deep, deep South Louisiana). My mother's cut glass relish trays came in clear, frosted, and the groovy, dark-green hobnail pattern (which had a matching devilled egg dish). She's still living, so I had to buy my cut-glass relish tray at the thrift store for $2. Our relish tray is usually stocked with 1)cornichons & pickled pearl onions 2)kalamata or other good black olives 3)pickled okra or pickled green beans 4)homemade hot pickled carrot sticks. Depending on whether she uses the big tray or the smaller one, this stuff is sometimes supplemented with her pecan cheese spread (no pimentos, sorry) or some cream-cheese & pickapepper sauce (or pepper jelly). Funny! We always devour the whole thing, despite the other delicacies about to be served during dinner.

I'm hoping we get a few decent taco trucks out of the migration of latinos to NOLA! It's too soon to tell if people will stay. I think the housing situation will impact the settlement rates...affordable housing is in such short supply at present.

I believe that the shipping restrictions are due to various citrus pests (citrus canker being an especially virulent one), which also affect other fruit trees. I've tried to order citrus trees from out-of-state plant nurserys and have encountered limitations on shipping destinations for the trees as well.

Can anyone out there translate the dialogue for me? The poboy doesn't look half-bad.

Two words: orange wine. We used to make a batch every year before a terrible freeze killed off our friend's orchard. Peel enough to half-fill a five-gallon crock. Squash fruit thoroughly (clean feet, potato masher, your hands, whatever). Add five pounds of sugar, enough water to mostly fill the crock, and stir to dissolve the sugar. Cover with a flour-sack towel securely and put in a cool spot (back porch, garage, we kept ours under an antique church pew in the foyer) and listen to it bubble for a few weeks. Peek under the cloth every few days; skim off any evil-looking stuff on top (discolored, not just foamy). Wait for the bubbling to slow and start tasting. Bottle it when it tastes good. Use to deglaze pans for sauces, as an addition when cooking wild ducks or venison, to baste roasted chicken... Another use, albeit a little late: here in south LA, satsumas are a traditional halloween give-away. As my daddy always said: if you don't know 'em well enough to eat their homemade goodies & fruit, then you shouldn't be trick-or-treating at that house!

Some offices on campus at TU are due to open up next week, so there should be additional daily traffic in the University area; I'm looking forward to a lunch at Kyoto or Ninja, with a stop at creole creamery, too. My Brocato's connection says that they will almost certainly reopen, but it will take quite some time for the family to marshall its resources & begin to replace equipment, etc. Perhaps a closure as long as a year...

A business trip forced me to miss this year's SFA symposium--wish I could have been there this year of all years. But I want to temper some of the negativity with a little positive energy. Yes, large swaths of NOLA were devastated, but we have to stop thinking of southeast LA food culture as ending at the Orleans/Jefferson Parish lines. The culture is in the people, not just in the place. You can get a top-knotch poboy in no less than fifteen spots (by my count) between NOLA & Houma/Thibodaux, and I can think of at least two places in the same geographic area with fried chicken as good as Ms. Willie Mae Seaton's. So the skills & knowledge are out there, as is the public who appreciates such cooking. Yes, the two components aren't necessarily in the city proper at the moment, but let's wait a year or two before we stage the jazz funeral for New Orleans cooking. And John Besh's assertion that the non-vietnamese small fishermen will not return to business is incredibly unfair to those cajuns, croatians, and yats who will persevere. I had LA oysters last weekend--they were great--as well as crabs. I'll wait until next May's inshore shrimp season to see how many small shrimpers do or do not return. Meanwhile, eat & cook & teach someone how to make a gumbo, properly fry a chicken, or cook a pot of red beans. THAT's the only way to perpetuate culture; eating out is just half the battle.

Tan Dinh has reopened, post-K. Same great food, no damage at all.

Two hurricane-related go-cup items: 1) the Times-Pic website featured a photo of a National Guard Humvee in the drive-thru lane of a daiquri shop! 2)Go-cups saved several pieces of my furniture during TS Cindy & Hurricane Katrina. My (mostly) raised house has a ground-floor addition, home to several heavy pieces of wooden furniture and subject to slight flooding when it rains more than seven or eight inches in a couple of hours (fortunately, this only happens every two or three years). The piano, etc, are too heavy to lug up the steps to the raised part of the house, so when I suspect that we'll flood, I put big plastic go-cups on the legs of the furniture--works like a charm! Little plastic levees...

Have you looked at the readily available reprint of Lafcadio Hearn's Creole cookbook? Interesting b/c he was an outsider writing for profit, and the little book covers the waterfront of creole food. It includes home-style recipes (like cooking for invalids, etc), not just restaurant stuff.

Yes, the hollow cypress stump is quaint, but I use a cuisinart to grind up the dried leaves & then sift out the big particles & re-process 'em. Tastes fine, and handy for those of us without a stump lying around.

While the groves in Plaquemines Parish were devastated, several commercial-scale groves to the south & west of NOLA in Lafourche Parish are picking right now & have bumper crops. My first satsuma of the season was a little dry (we've had little significant rain since Rita), but quite sweet. I just purchased a tree for my newly sunny backyard (thanks to Katrina!)--can't wait to harvest its three meager fruits.